We did manage to play a couple of games over the weekend.
Three games of Ark Nova and I, stunningly, won all three of them! I seem to be on a roll! One of them, Maryse was even in the negatives, a first! This can only mean I’m headed towards a crushing defeat.
Then yesterday, we had Yvan over for some Ticket To Ride Rails and Sails. We palyed three games, each winning one! A very fair day, LOL
Tigris and Euphrates 2x - good game, but my experience have outgrown the group, alas. Also, games with shared-incnetives - e.g. Cube Rails, the Estates - and even the snowbally but brutal game of Age of Steam are more interesting to me nowadays
Bus okay. This is fun. Still not as good as the Top 3 (FCM, TGZ, Indo) but this is very good. Will keep it.
Innovation - alas, this is the older 3rd edition. Still amazing. Keen to play Ultimate with some expansions. What’s the point of lugging that box if I’m not gonna play with the expansions? Echoes of the Past + The Unseen seems like the two that I wanna play with the base game next time
Kemet: 2 Blood 2 Sand - glad to play this again. The last time I played it was with a slow af player that it killed my enthusiasm with this game and immediately sold it.
I enjoy this more this time, but I don’t regret selling it. Guess what I’m gonna say next?? I’d rather just play Cthulhu Wars. It’s just the better game.
Tbf, I’ve sold it as well since
Kemet? Any reason for selling it? Rules weight? Takes too long?
Awful rulebook and the game takes too long with the bash the leader ending.
Local pub game night. Played Fluxx (original 3rd edition from 2002),
tried out Push it! which was perfect for a pub table,
and then got to play the very out of print Legendary Encounters: Alien which is excellent. I got very dead by chestburster, but we nearly took down the final boss.
I like the legendary system, think I’ll try and buy the James Bond one (most of the others seem to be out of print and therefore triple the price on ebay).
Own it, and think it’s pretty great. It suffers, however, from sharing the terminology from the other Legendary games
The problem with Legendary Alien for me (the only one I’ve tried) is that in that setting and style of story I want to be playing an individual character.
Last night at Thirsty Meeples in Oxford:
First game of the evening was ito, clearly in the Wavelength sort of space: get a scale to rate things on, each of you thinks of a thing, try to arrange the things in order. Our feeling was that it was slightly too fiddly to be a good party game, but too party-game to be a good anything else. But if you want a more compact Wavelength you could do worse.
Then Furnace (base game only), which I taught and ran entirely from my pocketmod rulebook. Another “why haven’t I played this recently?” game.
Finally Century: Spice Road, which one of us had completely missed when it came out. I couldn’t help seeing a certain parallel with the engine-building of Furnace, in fact, though not enough to impair enjoyment of either game. Not a classic, for me, but agreeable for an occasional play.
Last night I tried my 4th game of Arcs.
I continue to be confused by the love for this game. It’s not bad, certainly. But it’s not… really… anything? It feels so random, and in exactly the same sort of way that Cribbage or Euchre feels random.
“Oh, but good play will see you win more often!” I hear you cry, imaginary Socrates-student. Yes, fine, but if so much of the game comes down to dumb luck… gah. I dunno.
But by the same token I don’t dislike it. It’s fine! I think! But gosh it’s a lot of squeeze for not much juice. But people rave about how good it is.
Argh.
I’m going to try another run at the Blighted Reach (we only played Base + Leaders & Lore), because maybe there’s something there that will make the game feel like my decisions are meaningful? I dunno.
Afterwards we played The Gang with 5 (Andy joined), and it was great fun. A very random game, admittedly, but it doesn’t pretend to be otherwise. We lost 3 rounds out of 4, but each of them were very close. I think two of my friends are going to pick up their own copies.
Sold it because it takes too long and it’s AP fest with AP prone people. It is rather tactical but you do get good with the hand management (or action management?). My last plays (3p and 4p) of it I felt that there’s control on what I’m doing.
Broke out Terraforming Mars after about a year. I lost, playing as Saturn Systems, against Maryse’s Ecoline, 90-83. Super close, fun game. Maryse played the area control game superbly.
Games Cafe
Calico, good puzzle but it’s ‘take and make’ which is not my cup of tea, at least something Cascadia has soem interaction in the drafting. The mIssus liked it so we now own it.
Kingdomino, a much better take and make
My Shelfie, better than I thought but it’s Phil Walker Harding so we all ended up with similar points
Point Salad, completing the take and make quadrilogy.
Family friendly, but all a bit meh.
and no trains.
some of these might work for your church weekend 
Had an office games night that wound up being just two of us, so I taught them The King is Dead. I was pretty confident they’d enjoy it, and I was not wrong :). I look forward to more games of this with them in the future.
“Finished” a campaign of Cursed City (the Warhammer Quest sequel). It’s… fascinating.
To not bury the lede/lead (I forget which), the game isn’t very good. The enemies behave too simply, the scenarios are interesting but exceptionally repetitive, and the boss battles are all identical (“Destroy 4 gravesand-timers then kill the boss”), including the final showdown against Radukar. It’s actually worse than that, because all 5 of the Lieutenant fights are 2 parts, and the first part (“Run away from the deadly gas”) is the same, and if you survive then you get to tackle part 2.
The part that confuses me is that these are the same designers, and in many ways the same design as Blackstone Fortress, and that game is great. Dicey, sure, but the scenarios are varied and interesting, the enemies have complicated but interesting flowcharts for their actions, and the story is injected throughout in neat ways. It doesn’t feel like a grind, whereas Cursed City? More like Grind City, amirite?
Anyway, we did a bunch of the lead-up missions, and then the first lieutenant mission, realized that they’re all identical, and then tackled Radukar instead. It was fine. A great way to spend days and days doing the same grind if you really like it, I suppose.
Then on Saturday a buddy wanted to try my copy of Star Wars Shatterpoint, which I have owned for years but never played.
It was fine. Neat ideas, and I can see how it improves on Marvel Crisis Protocol in some ways, but it didn’t really speak to me as great.
And then on Sunday a different buddy wanted me to learn Cyberpunk Combat Zone, which was… fine.
It was fine! The React system is like a watered down, worse version of Infinity’s ARO system, but the units don’t feel particularily interesting or varied, but it has some really interesting campaign potential (like a better version of Mordheim).
I think, honestly, that the biggest hurdle to both games is money. I am very tight on money these days (although with far more time), and so these games had to really, really wow me to get any chance that I would buy more/any models for them, and they didn’t. Some interesting potential, certainly, but I will stick with my SW Legion, Battletech, and Infinity for now.
What a hot lukewarm mess. What is this, even?
[picks up ringing phone]
“Uh huh… Sure. I see…”
[hangs up phone]
It’s a board game.
This entered my radar at some point in the past, because that’s how timelines work. A while ago (a year? 2 years? You’d have to be some sort of chronologist to keep track of such minute periods of time!) I received Endless Winter: Paleoamericans along with some expansions as part of a no-ship math trade. The core conceit here, I believe, is that the game mashes together various popular game mechanics into a cohesive strategy board game.
And we’ve seen this before! I know it didn’t win that many awards, but I think Merchants Cove is a great family-weight game, with the added benefit of built-in handicapping by way of the wildly-asymmetric titular Merchants, joined in a common “shared space” within the titular Cove.
If you look a bit deeper, you may even notice that Endless Winter: Paleoamericans and Merchants Cove share some of the same DNA, by way of their common designer(s)/developer(s): Jonny Pac and Drake Villareal
But the nature-vs-nurture debate is compelling here; where Merchants Cove focuses on the individual players having one or two mechanisms that they, and they alone, wrangle, Endless Winter throws everyone into the same arena to play the same game – deck-building worker-placement.
[zzzzz]
Huh? Sorry, fell asleep there for a second. [yawn] Yeah, so like I was saying, a deck-building worker-placement game. Oh, and there’s a bit of resource management, some area majority, and another spatial puzzle attached off the to side, and then a couple of tracks that, basically, just influence final scoring.
I played with the Glaciers module (I think it’s included in the base game?). Definitely worthwhile: it adds a very, very small amount of exploration to the map and provides extra rewards for expansion – also seems to work every well with the solo mode; giving the player more opportunities to exploit their intelligence to stay competitive with the solo AI, while also adding additional wrinkles to the AI.
So here’s the thing: it’s pretty good for a deck-building worker-placement game. The deck-building is pretty lame, honestly, but that’s probably good because the resource management with the worker-placement is pretty interesting.
After finishing my first game (and losing by 3 points to the solo AI), I contemplated playing again with a few of the modules added on. But, I’ve been eager to get High Frontier 4 All on my table, and my eyes kind of glazed over when I started looking at the expansion modules.
Expansions, and what I think they do:
So, the expansions/modules definitely have the capability to improve the deck-building experience, which, as I suggested above, was fairly pedestrian.
Definitely will play it again. The physical production is very good (I seem to have gotten a preshaded edition, but thankfully without the neoprene boards or resin pieces)
Modules:
Updated Altruism Rules
§ V4c. Special Rule.
• Research Auction Operation (I2). Instead of the research auction (I2g), take the top card of a patent deck for your Operation, including bonus supports (I2g). This costs a number of Aquas equal to the number of cards taken. The academia hand limit (I2a) still applies to solitaire games. With the Marketeer faction privilege, …
Updated Hermes Fall Rules
§ V5b. Setup. As per Altruism (V4b), with any Modules, with the following changes:
Patent Deck Setup. Set aside the Mass Driver thruster before setting up the Patent decks per V4b. Then add it to the five-card Thruster stack and reshuffle.
4G3. Module 0 Solitaire Variant (Justin Grey)
When playing any solitaire variant that includes Module 0, use the provided solitaire political assembly. This changes the laws (O5), with the design goal to make all Ideologies relevant, and to reduce the randomness and luck-factor of the experience, so one can plan better for victory. The revised setup, and the new Laws and lobbies are:
a. Setup. Place an additional delegate of your faction color into centrist. All Solitaire Module 0 games must include all cards in each patent deck used. Finally, use a busted disk instead of a cube in the Sunspot Cycle.
b. Lobby. Pay 1 Aqua and Discard a delegate in an inactive Ideology to use its Law.
c. Indiviuality Law “Launch Contracts”. Boosting is a free action. This does not earn NASA any Aqua.
d. Equality Law “Subsidized Research”. When initiating a research auction Operation, you pay one for the top card of a patent deck and one bonus support (if it has one). If it has a second support that you want, you may pay one more aqua for this support.
e. Authority Law “Regime Change”. After an Event Roll, Discard a delegate here to change to or cancel inspiration. This may be the same delegate from a lobby action.
f. Unity Law “Sol Unification”. Lobby cost is 0 Aqua. Replace season blue Anarchy with International Assistance: FINAO cost is halved (rounded up) until the end of season blue.
g. Honor Law "Paleoconservative Directive II. During a fundraise Operation, the Aqua gained equals number of glory chits brought back to LEO (ticker tape parade (La) only).
h. Freedom Law “Free Trade Act II”. May sell 2 cards (including Black-Side) with a free market Operation.
i. Centrist Law “Mishap Insurance”. Unchanged from the Core game (O5g).
Potential grey area: 4G3a indicates that all cards in each patent deck is used. This has an effect on V5b. I read somewhere that the intent is to shuffle the Mass Driver into the top 5 cards of the Thruster patent deck; that is what I did.
Hermes Fall is a great little scenario for getting used to the core game loop while still using all of the core rules, plus the optional solitaire M0 update from Exodus (I printed a new M0 mat for solitaire use, but you wouldn’t have to if you didn’t want to)
First, a confession: I made mistakes. Several. Possibly dozens. Many were in my favor, others were not. Perhaps it should be an *, but the Hermes Fall is a fairly fragile scenario, if you ask me, so I’m not worried. The point of this exercise was to get used to running the game on my table. Which, I’ll point out, is easier than running the Tabletop Simulator mod, but the TTS mod does provide a nice action tracker so you don’t have to remember if that rocket movement you just did was the end of last turn or the beginning of this turn.
Second: I saved the planet! Hooray! I managed to get a rocket put together rather quickly, along with one of the more versatile generators, In-core Thermionic. I had a rocket on its way to Hermes a before the end of the first sun cycle. I couldn’t quite squeeze in the second mission in that second (of 3) blue phase, but I had the rocket ready and waiting there at the end of the last red phase – and on top of that, I got the glory chit back to Earth
Third: this game has a weird table presence. It is awesome in some ways. But, in other ways… For example, here’s the final board state, when Earth was saved and my crew had just landed (after spending at least a dozen years hanging out on Hermes a)
Exciting, yeah?
So, what’s next? Solo Altruism, likely with modules M1 (Terrawatt & Futures) and M2 (Colonization).
But I might check out the variant in the M1 appendix, Werner’s Star
This is a great game. The weakest part is definitely the ramp-up to getting your rocket off the ground initially. A badly-timed “Budget Cuts” event can ruin your day, and for a game so deeply rooted in hard science, this game has a ton of randomness about what patents you’ll be able to get
M1 and M2 are awesome. The Home Bernals will allow you to bypass Earth’s Van Allen Belts.
Also, it allows Martian strat to be very interesting. I have put an elevator at Mars and allow us to use it effectively
Games night!
Trans-Siberian Railroad Won by getting 4 companies nationalised after 1 got nationalised Inthe previous dividend round. I had one share in the last one standing with less money invested in the bad companies.
May need to find a copy
Tigris and Euphrates final scores were 4-4-5-7. I was a four.
Super stabby and great. Need to think.about whether if Ill play it enough to stay in my collection.
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